


Castaway Menagerie

by motsureru



Category: American Vampire
Genre: Brooding, Comic, Gen, Graphic Novel, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2012-07-13
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motsureru/pseuds/motsureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicia’s private musings just prior to the end of Vol. 3 (spoilers through issue 18 and Survival of the Fittest).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Castaway Menagerie

            The rain was clawing at the thin window panes and the wind was rattling them in desperation. April wanted in. Felicia had a mind to let it; the water was already slithering beneath the sill, and somewhere she thought she heard the pitter patter of it scampering through a crack in the roof and across her hardwood floors. It wouldn’t be long, surely, before it came to join her. The rain would announce itself as a small splat against her forehead, chastising her for slouching in the armchair with her head tilted back and her legs splayed wide. She hadn’t even taken off her boots when she came in, and her arms dangled idly over the rests.

            The storm was better company than most, at least. Not as good, perhaps, as the single malt whiskey she clutched carelessly by the neck, glass bottom nearly tapping the floor. But it was hard to compete with a silent companion that kept on giving. Since returning from Romania all Felicia wanted was silence, but she had been smothered by superiors and colleagues, people who wanted to know every last detail of the excursion to Castle Vlan. Official reports needed to be submitted, assessments written up; more importantly, someone had to account for Agents Meyer and McCogan. Hobbes, at least, had been blissfully quiet, even hastening the meetings when he saw how short Felicia’s fuse was becoming. They’d even managed to finish her extraction interview with only one death threat on the clerk.

            On her way out of the interview room the others all stopped to stare like they usually did, with poor pretensions at furtiveness. A room full of eyes, looking but pretending not to, scanning Felicia like the next target, gauging her every step like she was a predator that needed to be hunted. The young ladies, mostly secretaries and researchers, fawned and sighed like she was a hero, an idol among harsher, less mannered counterparts. But the men smoldered quietly with agitation and resentment. How her mother always shrugged it off, she could never understand. The mutters about little girls courting death, the whispers about how Abilena had spread her legs for vampire filth and a halfling mongrel came out. Damned sired of the damned. _Don’t you let it bother you, sweet one,_ her mother would say, _This war was yours first. And yours by birth. They’ve got a cause, but you’ve got a mission. Yours will be finished first._

            Felicia absently touched her throat. The locket her mother gave her when she was a little girl wasn’t there anymore. She’d given it up years ago for a chance to put Skinner Sweet down in Las Vegas. There would be poetry in it, she thought at the time, to use that old gold, that inheritance of the Old West, to punch out a bullet that would bring an end to the outlaw responsible for her father’s death, responsible for her current state of being. But Sweet had survived. Felicia had failed. And all she had left were the gold scraps she had saved, the old yellow chain, and the photograph of her father from inside. All of which sat on her coffee table in a little wooden box, right next to her candy dish full of bullets for her .38 special. Hopes for the future and keepsakes of past, side by side.

            She had a lot of those. Items her mother had given to her, relics of her father that made the stories of his heroics more real. A dusty pair of boots that sat in the back of her closet, the star-shaped badge tucked away in her dresser drawer that quietly rusted a little more each year... Felicia once told her mother she wanted Jim Book’s revolver so that she could put Sweet out of his misery the way it was meant to be done. But her mother only went a little pale at the request and said she couldn’t part with it, not that.

            Felicia’s favorite artifact of the legendary Jim Book was an old vest. It was once a dark color brown, but had long since faded from exposure to the sun and the hardship of the job, the soft leather parched and cracked under the test of time. She wondered how long her mother had kept it, how long it had been buried in the single chest of belongings she brought with her to the Vassals of the Morning Star. She wondered if her mother had slept beside it some nights, aching and swearing revenge.

            Had Abilena worn it now and then? Like Felicia did now? She took a drink from the whiskey bottle in hand- which was starting to feel a little light- and lifted her free fingers to trace the old chipped buttons down the front. The vest felt like supple comfort and smelled of dusty childhood memories with the father she’d never had. Next to the lamp at her side sat an albumen print of Lawman James Book, all serious eyes, stern and unreadable behind his mustache and low brimmed his hat. When she turned her head and looked past the glass and frame to that face, he seemed all the more distant to her. But this remnant on her shoulders, too big for her slender frame, this old leather that wrapped around Felicia in a loose embrace, let her close her eyes and see the deserts he’d crossed. The dark nights Jim Book had walked. The wicked eyes of the monster he’d faced. Felicia tried to imagine herself filling that vest with his broad shoulders and confidence, not charging into danger, but strolling into it stoically with the grit to get the damn job done. To be all the things a sheriff like Jim Book had to be back then.

            But the knowledge of her mission, her history, the legend of the old lawman, none of it was enough to change the fact that she couldn’t write him a better ending any more than she could remedy her own beginnings. She couldn’t ignore the way a bloodsucker caught her nose, floated down her throat with a sticky scent like tangy citrus and iron on her tongue. Nor could she block out the doubters, the men full of suspicion that haunted her even here, at her home with the Vassals.

             _How’s it feel, Book? Having Sweet **inside** you?_

            As if she didn’t know what they meant by that. Normally the other agents, especially those with experience and a true respect for the job, were too serious for that kind of lewdness. But at the end of the day they were all the same thing- broken men looking for something to fill that grainy, empty pit some creature of the night had left inside them. Men that hesitantly asked companionship of their brothers in arms, knowing that the next mission would likely see that friend a mangled corpse in a ditch with his throat torn out. Felicia could never be that comrade. She would always be an oddity, a sideshow. That girl who could smell a vamp coming when the rest were left blind in the pitch, teeth set on edge.

            They used to love getting a rise out of her for it, back when she was green and the chip on her shoulder too sharp to burden without a little blood. She’d put a knife through a guy’s palm and a gun up under his chin before Cashel dropped by with a hand on her shoulder and given her a single, calm look that made shame flood in and her heart sink. Cash wasn’t always there, but when he was, they knew better, and she did too. Felicia never asked him to defend her, gave him an earful whenever he did. She even gave him shit for not letting her fight her battles.

            But, just a little, she was grateful for his solid presence and his talent for holding her back in a way she had trouble saying. Knowing Cash, he never expected or needed the words. Maybe he always knew about the unbearable guilt she’d carried ever since Las Vegas, the tightness in her chest that made him able to defuse her with a simple look. If he did, he didn’t let on. He’d just pass through HQ like always, the eternal wanderer who could never make a home there or anywhere else.

            The Vassals warned him that he should leave Gus with them whenever he went out to follow a new lead on a cure. But Cashel didn’t have the same thirst to kill vampires the others did; he chased after the science, the hopefuls, the charlatans, ever praying for a new discovery and keeping Gus close for the slim chance that fated day would come. If he happened to lop off the head of a vampire along the way, it was a small perk, but never the end game. Wasn’t he angry under there? She wanted to feel it from him. Whenever he happened to check in at HQ for a few days, she found herself staring at him hard without meaning to. What was going through that head of his?

             _Aren’t you going to ask?_ she had questioned Cashel on the train, when Castle Vlan loomed menacing in the window of their train car.

             _Ask what?_

             _There’s word he might have come east. The intel seems solid. I thought you’d want to know._ But his mission never seemed to be the same as hers, and she just couldn’t understand why. Not really. Not then. Cashel had just smiled a little and slipped his hands into his pockets.

             _You can’t keep holding onto all the bitter like that, Felicia_ , he had replied, turning his blue eyes to the snow striking soundlessly against the glass. _Or else you’re always gonna need a little **sweet** in the world_.

            Cash was always like that. So goddamn _resigned._ And always fucking right.

            When Felicia tilted her head back for another drink, his worn out old newsboy cap toppled off her mess of auburn hair and fell from her shoulder onto her lap. She told herself the tingle on her lips was from the whiskey. The bottle had been sitting in the back of Cashel’s locker at the east coast headquarters, crammed between some notes and a dirty old shirt. She didn’t quite know why, but she took that too, along with a picture of Lilly he had taped to the inside of the locker door. Lilly had a pretty sunlit smile that was frozen, a motionless hand tucking back a lock of her pale blonde hair against the wind. The shirt and the picture both sat on the table next to her locket scraps and bullets, overseen by Jim Book’s ghost on the side table and his vest buttons staring emptily from her chest into the dark of the room. Felicia gripped Cashel’s hat tightly in hand and swallowed down the knot in her throat with some more single malt. This was all there was, really: a menagerie of mementos and castaways from lives long gone, objects that only echoed emptiness and death when called upon for comfort.

            The bottle, too, was empty, and it elicited painful tears and an unwelcome sob when Felicia slammed it against the floor, shards of glass tinkling and bouncing energetically across the wood. She knew the whiskey was meant to soften these moments, make them duller and harder to truly grasp, but though she tried, liquor only made her feel warm and like she had to take a long piss to empty her straining stomach. _Don’t try getting vamps plastered the old fashioned way-- doesn’t work,_ she always told the new recruits. _It’s got to be in the blood for them to feel it._ But she didn’t feel it either, no matter how many bottles went down her throat.

             _Don’t think too hard on it_ , _Felicia,_ Cashel had said once, after the other agents had slurred out unpleasant accusations to her sober gaze and left the bar. _Just one more thing you’re better at than them._

            She couldn’t possibly add up all the things she owed Cashel. All the ways he’d helped her stop being that young, stupid kid she had been when she turned up in Las Vegas and ruined him, shattered his world. She owed Cash a life. Two, if she was honest about it. She had stolen Lilly’s life, but he had given hers back in more ways than she could fathom.

            Felicia stood up and crossed the room, her boots popping bits of glass against the floorboards. She grabbed her travel pack from the couch and unzipped it, yanking open either side roughly as if it posed a challenge. She picked up a small gray cloth from inside and unfolded it. In the dark, the vial of orange liquid Dr. Pavel had pressed into her hand before they fled Castle Vlan seemed red. More menacing. As if it knew its own price.

            Three. Maybe it was three.

            _You get Gus his medicine. Take care of him for me. Take him for a walk in the sun, will you?_

            She gripped the vial tightly in her hand.

             _Remember what I told you, Felicia._

            Felicia slid the container into her pocket and then shrugged off the beaten vest from her shoulders, throwing it on the table over Cashel’s shirt and Lilly’s smiling face. She walked back to the armchair and snatched up the cap from the floor where it had fallen, pulling it onto her head firmly. Beneath the museum there was a place she belonged. Beneath that, there was a life she owed to Cashel McCogan, rattling its sad little cage and quailing hungrily against a comfortless night where no father’s hand would ever reach out in kindness again. It was time to thank Cash, she thought as she grabbed her coat and threw open the door. Thank him for giving her a keepsake that could at last be more than a phantom of bygone sorrows.

            Felicia strolled into the storm.

 


End file.
